The Hienrich Boll Foundation, India Habitat Centre, Max Mueller Bhavan and
Zubaan are pleased to invite you to the first lecture in the series Partition:
The Long Shadow
at Gulmohar, India Habitat Centre, Vardhaman Marg, New Delhi
at 6.30 pm on 17 August 2007
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF NATIONAL SPACE
Contested Legality and Citizenship Practices in Post-Partition Northeast India
by Dr Sanjib Baruah
The shadow of the Partition of 1947 looms large on the contemporary life of
Northeast India in one distinctive way. On the one hand, the new international
border dividing India and East Pakistan/Bangladesh is seen as inviolable. On
the other hand, the partition could not change the position that the region
acquired in colonial times as a frontier. The flow of people from one of the
subcontinentÂ’s most densely populated areas, to a relatively sparsely populated
region open to new settlements, could not suddenly be turned off. The border
remains extremely porous till this day, and there is an extensive blurring
between citizens and non-citizens. Viewed through the lenses of actual
practice of citizenship, rather than legal fictions, what we have in many parts
of Northeast India arguably, is a flexible citizenship regime -- a flexible
approach to voting where people can vote despite indeterminate citizenship
status. Focusing on Assam, the paper will examine the politics of
how this regime has come about. While the discourse of illegal immigration
dominates headlines, given the routines of illicit trans-border activity, the
political aesthetics of everydayness has framed competing perceptions. Despite
obvious tensions in this regime, it points to the reality of an actually
existing transnational space that the trope of inviolable borders cannot
handle. The regionÂ’s future political stability in the long run, I argue, will
depend on an ability to develop institutions and practices that are in line
with this reality, rather than policies that seek to unilaterally enforce
border control.
Sanjib Baruah is Professor of Political Studies, Bard College, New York. He
holds concurrent professorial appointments at the Centre for Policy Research,
New Delhi and the Indian Institute of Technology, Guahati. He is the author of
Postfrontier Blues: Toward a New Policy Framework for Northeast India
(Washington D.C.: East-West Center, 2007), Durable Disorder: Understanding the
Politics of Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2005), and India Against
Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Oxford University Press, 1999).
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